It’s really disheartening to observe how the whole experience of computing has gone retrograde for anyone who has the vaguest clue what they’re doing.

Every day, computers become less powerful, less useful, more difficult and annoying to use and more locked down. All because the droolers demand it. Or at least don’t care.

It truly was an exciting time to be alive if you liked computers during the 1980s and 1990s as each upgrade brought much more power, a better interface, more useful software and increasingly user-focused design. Now, design is designer- and moron-focused so for people like me find computers increasingly annoying or even impossible to use.

Even though the hardware has gotten better, for anyone with half a brain computers are now so very much slower because doing something that used to take two clicks or a second at the command line requires an increasingly large list of arcane hacks, mods or breaking into your own computer to battle against it turning into an oversized mobile phone.

Because I’m selfish, I wish computer use had never democratized, that morons and smartphones had never invaded the computing landscape. I enjoyed it a lot more when I could actually make my machine do what I wanted it to do, rather than be trapped in some toy OS mobile phone nightmare where some suit-bedecked bumblefuck decided what my computer was allowed to do.

It really is going to be like the 1960s again soon — a small coterie of people knowing how to use a real computer, and able to afford one, who seem like demi-gods compared to those who just know how to click on something madly, and if that doesn’t work, that’s it.

That’s not a better world, but that’s an inevitable world.

The future — and it will be terrible — is big, dumb, and slow.